


like an angel straight from hell

by CloudDreamer



Series: through the looking glass [6]
Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Dark Seattle, Heavensmaw, Just kinda gross things, Mirrorverse, Scars, adaption, hivemind - Freeform, the gum wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29964171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CloudDreamer/pseuds/CloudDreamer
Summary: The hellhound searches for a missing packmate who has gone elsewhere. She finds her own world is not the only one that's been changing.Recommended Listening: Werewolf Gimmick by the Mountain Goats
Relationships: Alaynabella Hollywood & Alaynabella Hollywood
Series: through the looking glass [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2144031
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	like an angel straight from hell

The hellhound stretches her body, muscles rippling with anticipation. The wall is behind her, already beginning to cover itself just fast enough for her to notice but slowly enough that every time a squirming piece of gum reaches out to connect to another fresh chunk is a notable occasion. It’s a mesmerizing process, one that leaves her gut churning, but the hellhound has no time to consider its process. She is on a mission. She has been told that things will resolve themselves if given time, but the hellhound is not a particularly patient creature.

She was warned of this place time and time again. Each time she landed back in the city on the other side of that disgusting wall, the rest of her new team would eye each other— would this be the time the hellhound lost her restraint? Would this be the time she would seek her other self? The hellhound is not a reckless creature. She is aware of the dangers— she has listened well to the stories that Goodwin tells between songs, played off as jokes but really, subtle warnings, and she has studied the network of scars that Farrell earned from one passage here over and over again. But the hellhound is not afraid of scars. 

She has seen death reflected in the brilliant white eyes of the umpires. She has felt the earth shake as the underbelly of the world itself rose to swallow everything she knew whole, known the touch of that horrid Mouth as intimately as a lover and as harsh as a god’s vengeance. She is as much of a monster as the entities that have touched her. Sap runs through her veins, roots cross in and out of her neck like a barbed wire necklace, and she howls with the fury of a thousand extinguished suns, heat radiating from her as she cries out for vengeance. As she cries out for blood.

The sun here bleeds blue, dripping down the spear that Goodwin has etched a mimicry of in crisp black ink up and down her spine, and none of her stories could have prepared the hellhound for how shocking the wound is. This is Sol, the proper Sol and not some inferior copy, and his corpse is pinned among lesser stars. It was nothing like her mentor, the gentle presence that stood behind her and guided her swing, whose heat held the umpires back, but she is still taken aback to see him so callously displayed. 

It had to be done, she trusts Goodwin on that, and she should not be surprised that the corporation that showed so little gratitude to their savior would not bother with funerary arrangements for the behemoth she slayed. And yet, she is. At least that vile fox showed respect for the act they’d committed. 

There is the same absence that she registers as where Lars beheld her world so many years ago, and this moon is still alive, not burned to pieces in Sol’s wreckage. It is beautiful, and it is wretched, splattered with traces of that brilliant cobalt. It pulses to a rhythm that the hellhound cannot reach, a frequency that she knows she might be able to, if she was only the right sort of receiver.

But this compass is not for her. The hellhound’s true north is already set, and as she sets her jaw, tongue testing her teeth and snout tasting the air for the scent of the oncoming predators she knows will be arriving soon, she makes a promise, sworn on the laws of bone, flesh, and tooth alike. One day, she will return home, and on that day, she will be strong enough to protect that home. From gods, from fun house mirror monsters that threaten team, and from the doubt that seizes her heart like a snake pulling tight. The hellhound will not allow anyone else to be sacrificed. Not from this pack, not from Boston, and not from home.

She feels, rather than hears, the beat of the other monster’s drums. The girl approaches with diamonds in her eyes, moonlight kissing her like she’s its beloved just as the shadows unfurl around the hellhound. This girl is beautiful in the dark, perfection personified even as she twists back and forth to a melody that wasn’t made for her. Thorns rise up across the hellhound’s fur, splitting open skin to make room for weapons that even the gentle Garden couldn’t deny her, just as the girl couldn’t be denied the gemstones cascading across her, held together by chains. They are what she was given in her Boston, but they are still perfect— the heart of her true home. They are still warped out of tune by this place. 

The blue that runs from the wound the hellhound’s new — temporary, she reminds herself— pack mate inflicted infects the girl’s precious gemstones. It is revolting. It is vile. The hellhound knows her diamonds reach into her skin, knows they bleed and that blood would be the wrong color the same way she knew the girl would come. There is a connection between them, an awareness that runs deeper than the blood they do not share and as true as the name they do.

“Alaynabella Hollywood,” the hellhound hisses, her voice low and brutal. It is like sandpaper brushing against all the wrong textures, and it should not come from her canine body. The shape of her should be all wrong. But the mouth is much too generous with its gifts to allow such a thing as what is natural to stop it. It will not be stopped by anything at all, natural or otherwise, except, perhaps, the fathers of the pack. But two of them are gone, and if the hellhound is not strong enough, soon will the last. “I’m not here for you. Step aside.” 

It takes the girl seconds to respond. She jerks back and forth, something wrong with her body. It reminds the hellhound of the beginning of a seizure, and it takes effort to keep from lunging into motion to assist her reflection. She is all too aware that the rest of the corporates could be circling at this very moment. Goodwin’s said they should be in disarray, their loop not able to function with the flooding leaving their Oliver in her Seattle and her Oliver somewhere else— somewhere like _this_ Seattle, and overwhelmed with the addition of Mindy and this girl, but that’s no guarantee. She is exposed enough now. The tunnels will be safer, if she can find them.

She might have been told that Oliver will return in his own time, but she doesn’t trust the words of the gods. She only trusts her hands and paws. 

The girl straightens, robotically returning from the moment of vulnerability, and the hellhound wonders if she’d made a mistake, not taking a the moment of weakness as an excuse to attack. The Corporates, even one made of her, are brutal. They will beat their opponents into the ground without consideration. Singleminded, literally. Every iota of conviction channeled between them, reinforcing their brutal beliefs.

"Alaynabella Hollywood,” she states, tone somehow both flat and melodic. “Under normal circumstances, you would be considered a liability. Despite the special circumstances, the board has not changed their policy.” 

The hellhound bristles. She will be called nothing less than a threat, and she crouches, an aggressive gesture that suggests she’s about to pounce with all the force in her massive form. She carves her claws through the pavement, and they are sharp enough to leave gauges in concrete. They would rip open the girl’s chest easily enough, even if her body is as much metal and precious stone as it appears to be. Even if she would regrow, new layers of silver to shield her, the hellhound could turn her into a million tiny pieces. 

“Please, contain yourself,” the girl says, with a smirk that is entirely Allison Abbott. It looks all wrong on her face, without the bat swung over her shoulder. And Allison Abbott would never say please, even with that sharp edge. “In light of the ongoing crisis, the board’s privileges over certain matters, particularly those pertaining to blaseball and the dimensional relations it has made a concern, have been... suspended.” 

The hellhound recoils, and for a moment, she thinks she’s been shot by some sniper. She runs through a check of her body. Legs working, all four of them, tail poised. Eyes optimized for the sun, finally working under the brightness of the so-called Dark Seattle sky. Internal organs, a mess, same as always. There is nothing wrong with her body; it is only shock. 

The board, as far as the hellhound has heard, is equivalent in authority and power to a god. Each piece is replaceable, nameless executives that make calls they do not understand and effect people they care nothing for, as has been proven by several successful assassination attempts that might very well have been conducted by other members of the board, but collectively, a nigh indestructible malevolent force. 

Goodwin, who faced down actual gods, had been forced into exile by their combined malice. They cast her into the shadows. Those shadows might have embraced her as their own, granting her their favor and their strength, but the hellhound has seen how Goodwin flees from the dark. She has seen how Goodwin grips so hard onto everything she touches, as if it might fall away from her at any moment. 

As far as the hellhound has heard, they are white men in expensive suits who all seem to have the same face. That is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing she can conceive of. 

She growls. It’s a full body sound, one that rattles throughout her bones. In all of her forms, the hellhound has many bones. It is a necessity. 

“Impossible.”

The hellhound spits the words onto the pavement, leaving burn marks where the acid lands and creating this little sizzling sound. 

“Unlikely,” she corrects, with the voice of every customer service worker pushed past their limits and almost ready to kill that the hellhound has met in her life, turned up to ten. It’s only now that the hellhound realizes the girl is wearing bright red lipstick, and it’s smudged. There is a wild look in the girl’s eyes for a moment, and then it’s gone. The girl is everything at once, and the hellhound knows she can be a lot, but this is something else. She’s nothing and everything at once. “Their decisions on matters such as these were affecting the Company’s bottom line. We require Oliver Mueller. It is believed that you retrieving this false reflection will return the proper Oliver Mueller.” 

It’s hard to tell if she’s lying. 

“Why not start with that?” she snarls, accusatory and a bit sarcastic too. She continues to leave marks in the pavement, scratching it all up. She listens for the girl’s breathing, tries to eye how she changes her stance. She looks for all the little tells Esme used to point out when they were kids. They’re the same person, to some extent, it should be enough. But the hellhound can’t find anything honest or false in the girl. She doesn’t breathe right, but she doesn’t breathe wrong either. It’s too perfect, like she’s frickin’ meditating, and the hellhound thinks that even if she tore out the girl’s throat, she’d keep breathing that evenly. 

All of her microexpressions are stolen from the Garages that the hellhound knows, past and present, and she even manages to mimic the way Pitching Machine makes her feel— like there’s something wrong with reality. A gaping hole before her, something that is more things than should be possible. Too dense with possibility to be real, and yet, tangibly present. 

She smells wrong too. The hellhound knows her own taste, and she knows the taste of all the teams she’s been on. She knows the girl is something wrong, but she can’t even tell if she’s a victim of something horrific or an instigator. Did she have a choice in her own wrongness? The hellhound knows so much, about her own life and about this reflection, but she understands so little. It makes her want to roar. 

The girl opens her mouth, about to say something else with that voice cobbled together from disparate parts, but she shudders again, uncontrollable movement wracking her body, and the hellhound still holds back. It takes good seconds for her to right herself, seconds the hellhound takes to scan the environment, sniffing for more Corporates getting in position to reveal a trap, but when the girl recovers, she only says, “You should go now. Fix things. If you can.”

The hellhound hesitates, still concerned and unsure of who that concern should be directed towards. Herself, for coming here and now, for leaving the gateway behind? Oliver, lost in this maze of unbridled dead light? The girl, who is a patchwork doll with some of its stuffing pulled out? 

“Go,” the girl repeats, and the hellhound feels in her reflection the violence that left Goodwin’s body a mass of scar tissue, that took half of Farrell’s face. The girl is a hollow shell, filled to the brim with someone else’s ideals, and she wears them like her own. It’s an ugly fit, the girl into the puzzle that is the Corporates. She is a piece shoved into place, at the same time other chunks that fit more neatly are missing. But it is enough. It is more than enough. 

“ _Go_ ,” the girl repeats, and it’s an order. The hellhound has never been the best at following those, but she follows this one.


End file.
